text: Following extensive European travel in the 1920s, Oesper began writing and compiling biographies of notable European chemists. These biographies were published in the United States in 1929 in a journal article entitled "What a Chemist May See in Europe". The publication included 24 biographies, examples including Fritz Haber, Alfred Nobel, Wilhelm Ostwald, Joseph Priestley, among others.
  As part of his career as a researcher in analytical chemistry, in 1938 Oesper translated a significant treatise on analytical methods from the German language into English, thereby making the information more broadly available. From then, Oesper continued to translated important scientific works.
  Oesper wrote numerous short biographies of notable chemists and lectured on the history of chemistry. Particularly notable was his 1975 book The Human Side of Scientists, which emphasized the lives of the scientists over their scientific contributions per se. The book includes 138 short biographies of scientists, mostly chemists.